in 1995, nasa authorized-- or rather, congress authorized nasa to scan the skies 24 hours a at day, seven days a week, to look for these objects and we're doing it at three observatories in california, new mexico, and puerto rico. and those three observatories have accounted for about 98% of the bodies we know are out there. now, there are ways to defend ourselves once we know it's out there. and we have the technology to do it. it's just a question of putting the money together and deciding to do that. >> schieffer: all right well, that is a little bit reassuring, and thank you very much for helping us on something that most of us know absolutely nothing about. thank you so much. i want to turn now to our panel. tom rickes, it strikes me that one of the dangers is that in this age of intercontinental ballistic missiles, a nation might pick up something like this on their radar and before they identify it as a rock, would fire our own missiles back in retaliation that you might accidentally trigger a nuclear exchange. >> it was always a concern in the cold war that the russians would thin